London has been battered by 50mph winds that have felled trees and caused travel chaos. Powerful gusts swept across the capital as the Met Office issued a yellow "be aware" weather alert for most of the country.

Nests in show

Nests of tables are back in fashion, thanks to hit TV shows Mad Men and The Hour, which, with their obsessive attention to set design and period detail, shamelessly glamorise the mid-century interior, from its post-war, pared-back wooden furniture to its ashtrays and cut-crystal decanters. Add to this a wider revival of mid-century modernism and a big love affair with all things Scandinavian — remember the cool lighting in Borgen? — and it’s clearly more than a passing trend.

The G-Plan-meets-Scandi look is perfect for these post-recessionary times. After all, who still wants the oversized sofas and chunky coffee tables that were so emblematic of the excessive 1980s and 1990s? You only need to step into the revamped furniture department at John Lewis to see that the new aesthetic is all about clean lines, restricted colours, natural materials and, er, nests of tables; there are at least five different styles and sales are on the rise. Other big stores are flogging nests like crazy too, even Ikea, which has a stacking steel and wood version from the new PS 2012 collection, based on Ikea’s archive designs.

Habitat’s new creative director Polly Dickens, who lives on a barge and is always short of space at home, is a self-confessed nest lover. “They definitely do feel right now. They give a versatility and you can create groups of still lives using the various surfaces, especially in the range of colours that Kilo comes in,” she says, referring to Habitat’s new powder- coated steel and oak nests designed by rising Nordic stars, Elling Ekornes and Trine Haddal Hovet.

Sir Terence Conran is another nestophile. “They’re a simple but increasingly popular idea that has been given a new lease of life by the modernist design movement. They’re a great space- saving necessity and make for an interesting feature that does not dominate a room,” he says, having designed Barton, a nest of two solid oak tables, appropriately named after his own home, Barton Court.

Designer Tom Dixon has also fallen for the nest, adapting the idea for Flash, a cheeky trio of blingy brass and bronze tables that, he says, are “intended to be in the spirit of the iconic mirror ball”, while for diehard modernists, Ercol’s recently relaunched classic, the Windsor nest, has wooden surfaces and edges as gentle and smooth as pebbles.

Nests of tables, first recorded in 1807, reached a peak of popularity in the 1950s, but died a mysterious death in the 1980s. Presumably they had suffocated under stacks of ruched cushions, but they can breathe easy now and bask in their new-found popularity.